Safety and Reliability Journal Special Issue on Systems Engineering

The latest issue of the Safety and Reliability is now available online and SaRS members should have now received their hardcopies in the post. This issue is a special on Systems Engineering guest edited by Mikela Chatzimichailidou with support from Steve Denniss.  They both work for WSP, a world class design and built environment consultancy. Mikela is working for the Systems Engineering and Assurance group and Steve for the Digital Railway team. They both study and analyse rail systems – whether they are tangible, digital or human – through the lenses of systems safety. We are delighted that they have both recently accepted our invitation to become associate editors.

Systems Engineering is an engineering discipline, which introduces a more holistic approach to dealing with the safety and reliability of complex systems. Academia is feeding industry with new achievements and industry offers a prosperous ground for applied research. This special issue is a unique opportunity to present approaches, techniques and tools founded on the principles of systems engineering to deal with future safety challenges, from academia and various industry sectors. The papers published in this special issue touch on subject areas that are relevant to the construction, automotive and railway sector. Those areas are: Systems Engineering and Integration, Systems Thinking, Systems Safety, Complexity Management and Connected Systems. There is also a report of the 2018 International Cross-Industry Safety Conference (ICSC) at which several presentations acknowledged the need for more systemic and systematic approaches to deal with the increasing complexity of systems. This event was a factor in generating the idea for this special issue.

The editors hope that this special issue will increase the appetite of academia and industry for more joint initiatives and cross-border collaboration in the field of systems, integration and safety as an emergent behaviour of complex socio-technical and cyber-physical system. The Safety and Reliability Society can facilitate this through their webinars or LinkedIn group. See their website www.sars.org.uk for details.

If you are interested in joining the team who peer reviews papers or guest editing a special issue please email journal@sars.org.uk

For further details on how to submit a paper see Instructions for Authors.

To join the Safety and Reliability Society click here.